The IGP integrated in future microprocessors Haswell-DT (desktop), Haswell-MB (portable) and Haswell-LP (SoC Ultrabooks) unlike current Intel IGP, will have three variants: GT1, GT2 and gt3 new variant ; also give more power Intel IGP integrating their memory chips dedicated to IGP thanks to technology known by the codename Crystalwell .

For some time manufacturers as Nvidia GPUs pushed for modular architectures thanks to their high growth capacity (number of modules in climbing), while simplifying the design of the chip, where the Fermi (2010) the first to follow this model (now Nvidia offers its 3rd generation of modular architecture known as Kepler). But Nvidia was not the only one who noticed the benefits of modular architectures, Intel released its first modular architecture in early 2011 with IGP of its microprocessors Sandy Bridge, followed by AMD in late 2011 with Core Graphics architecture Next.

Going back to Intel, with its modular architecture so far has 2 variants of its IGP: gt1 (one module) and GT2 (two modules), this trend has continued in the IGP of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge where HD Graphics 2000 / 2500 (GT1) have a module with 24 ALUs, while HD Graphics 3000/4000 (GT2) have two modules with 48/64 ALUs (we promise to provide more details of Ivy Bridge IGP in a future article).

The IGP Haswell undergo an internal reorganization where each Row (which could be considered the equivalent of SMX or architectures Compute Unit Kepler (Nvidia) and Core Graphics Next (AMD) will consist of 5 EUS (the IGP of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge have formed by 4 rows in GT2 EUS and EUS in GT1 for 3), this reorganization allows Intel IGPs building more robust and more computing power and 3D.

The IGP variant GT1 Haswell will have 6 EUS (24 ALUs), but thanks to architectural improvements will provide better performance than their predecessors with 6EUs also, while the GT2 variant will consist of 20 EUS (80 ALUs “shader processors”) providing superior performance over a 25% to the current GT2 (HD 4000) Ivy Bridge.

The real surprise is GT3, which as rumored will consist of four modules, totaling 40 EUS and 160 ALUs (shader processors) and GT3 will also Crystalwell technology (dedicated graphics memory), without a doubt a quantum leap in relation to Intel’s previous IGP, which should provide at least 2.5x performance compared with the current HD Graphics 4000 (GT2) of Ivy Bridge.

Haswell will be available next year and its variant Haswell-DT desktop premiere the new socket LGA 1150, thanks to improvements in product design promises to be the most balanced in terms of Intel performance per core, graphics and GPU-accelerated computing.